Tag Archives: Chronicle Journal

Apologies everyone – I was a little bit confused as to what day it was and wasn’t thinking about posting on here. Luckily it’s still Tuesday (just a little later than I was planning on posting!)

So last week, when I was taking some me time, I was also on vacation from my day job. 🙂 The week off was fantastic – I made as little plans as possible because, as I said last week, I wanted to slow life down a bit and get caught up on some things I’ve been putting off.

Last Tuesday was #GivingTuesday. I wasn’t expecting it, but bUneke Magazine asked for all their volunteers to post on Instagram their #givingstory. So I shared this picture to Instagram, Twitter, and my personal Facebook page (although the latter two weren’t flipped like Instagram’s was). Once I was finished with that, I decided to keep working on some Sustainably North stuff. For yesterday’s Sustainably North post, I wanted to recreate the paper wreath that I put up on my door this year (I included a picture of it with my November column in bUneke Magazine). So I made a brand new wreath last Tuesday, and took a lot of pictures of all the steps for making it. Then for next Monday I wanted to talk about the banana bread I also pictured in that column (it’s my grandmother’s recipe). So on Wednesday I installed WP Ultimate Recipe to Sustainably North. I did a bit of research because I knew I wanted a professional looking recipe post on the blog – Shivar Web recommended WP Ultimate Recipe. I installed it and tried it out; it seemed to work fine so I stuck with it. I then baked some banana bread to take pictures of the entire process (although I barely used any pictures for the actual post, which will be on Sustainably North on the 10th), and later wrote and scheduled the post.

While taking the pictures of the banana bread, I was having a bit of trouble with my flash because I was getting a shadow from my camera. I ended up trying out a flash diffuser my dad gave me some time ago and it worked like a charm! 🙂

This was my freezer door last Wednesday night!

Oh, and I also need to give a shout out to my friend who provided the walnuts for Wednesday’s banana bread baking! I always forget that the recipe calls for walnuts (and is way better with walnuts) and I never seem to have any on hand (although I have a freezer door full of bananas). When I texted her to ask if it was okay that the banana bread wasn’t going to have any (she was waiting to help me eat it), she said she had some “nut pieces,” which turned out to be walnuts! 🙂

After that, I started working on a draft of a book review to post on Sustainably North on December 17th. Once that’s done, I’m going to talk about the article I wrote for the December issue of bUneke Magazine (I feel that it’s a perfect topic for Christmas Eve), then do another Article Roundup for December 31st. And that will get me through until the new year!

I’ve been pushing to get all of these posts written for Sustainably North because I really want to reassess what my plan is for the next while. Back in June I made a plan for the rest of 2018 on Sustainably North. And then I proceeded to completely ignore that plan and kind of wing it. I know that things did change a bit because I wasn’t expecting to be writing a monthly column in bUneke Magazine. But now that I’m feeling rather on top of things again I think it’s time to stop running by the seat of my pants.

Wednesday was also when I started reading Will Write for Food by Dianne Jacob. While writing the banana bread recipe I realized that I had no idea how recipe writing was actually done….so I read a whole book on food writing. Most of the book wasn’t very relevant to my needs, but I found it pretty interesting to read all the same. Once I finished it on Saturday, I went back and edited the recipe on Sustainably North; I feel a lot more confident about how the post and recipe look now. 🙂

Saturday ended up a rather productive day because I also edited and scheduled the book review for December 17th for Sustainably North. That means I’ve just got two posts left to write and schedule for 2018!

The new issue of bUneke Magazine came out on Saturday, so over the last few days I’ve been reading it over and scheduling Tweets about it for @SustaintheNorth as I do every month. Once that is done, I’m going to take a break from Sustainably North to actually think through that City of the Dead worldbuilding stuff and hopefully get on with that story for the Make Your Way anthology.

Oh, and I almost forgot – I had a book review published in the Chronicle Journal on Sunday (republished on TBPL Off the Shelf yesterday) about Patricia Briggs‘ Cry Wolf. I actually read Cry Wolf last year and have been hanging onto this book review as a spare. Over the last few months I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction books that the library didn’t have, so I felt now was a good time to use this review. Also regarding TBPL Off the Shelf, this month’s author interview is going to be a bit later than planned (thanks to me being off last week) – I’m hoping to get it posted tomorrow night, but it may have to wait until a bit later in the week.

This weekend, my 25th article was published! It’s my 24th @ Your Library Article (formerly Library Detective) article. Back in January, the library changed both the name of the newspaper column and its function: rather than just writing about whatever we want to, each month, where possible, there should be one article on a library collection, one on a service, one on a program or event, and one on a patron’s feedback.

For this article, I decided to write about TBPL‘s partnership with Ohm Base, a local hackerspace which was losing its space. I was actually hanging out with friends who are part of Ohm Base when they were talking about losing their space; this was around the same time that the library was beginning to look for partnerships with local organizations, so the timing ended up perfect for everyone! Over half a year later, the makerspace is open but still a work in progress. Ohm Base ran their first program at the end of April, so now seemed like an excellent time to talk about them for @ Your Library.

Now, typically I’ve been writing @ Your Library articles like an essay, using the structure of “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” That works really well when talking about books, like I’ve normally been doing. Or when highlighting TBPL Off the Shelf (my 23rd article, which was the first one I wrote when we switched to @ Your Library) and our March Break programs (my 24th article). But for this article, I wanted to do something differently: I wanted to write it as a legitimate newspaper article, complete with quotes from the people who are setting everything up. To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has done this in the column, so I thought that was really cool (although it’s not the first time I’ve tried something new in the column – I failed to write about it here, but I’m also the first one to publish an article in twoparts.)

So if you have a chance, give my “makerspace” article a read (and let me know how well I did, writing it using the newspaper article format!)

Two weeks ago, my 20th Library Detective article was published in the Chronicle Journal! To mark the occasion and to highlight the library’s blog, I decided to write about the author interviews I have been doing for the last nine months. Because that topic gave me a lot to talk about, I ended up focussing on the books all the authors I’ve talked to recommended.

Today my 19th Library Detective article was published in the Chronicle Journal (my local newspaper). While this is may be my 19th Library Detective article, it’s also my 20th published article (not counting book reviews)!

This time I wrote about all the books and eBooks on game design the Thunder Bay Public Library has available. If you don’t have access to the Chronicle Journal but would still like to read it, you can find it here.

Since I haven’t really blogged about them all, I should also mention that there are links to my other Library Detective articles here. I’ve written about a diverse range of topics since “A Renewed Interest in Archery,” including zombies, procrastination, screenwriting, and the Tudors (which ended up the library’s first and only two-part article).

Today my eighth Library Detective article was published in the Chronicle Journal. With the popularity of Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games, I thought that exploring archery would make an interesting topic. I’d heard that the books have inspired many people (particularly younger girls) to give the sport a try, so I tried to highlight some of the library’s resources for experts and beginners alike.

My seventh Library Detective column was published today in the Chronicle Journal under the title “Picture-perfect photography books.” This time I decided to talk about my photography hobby, linking photography with spring because there are so many amazing things to photograph this time of year. But while I was writing that article we had a large snowstorm, making spring seem much further away than it really is; that prompted me to open with the line “The signs are everywhere: the lakes and rivers are melting, the trees are sprouting leaves and we know the flowers are eventually going to bloom.” While we still don’t have any flowers blooming, the large snow fall has pretty much disappeared so I know blooms are immanent!

If you’re interested in giving my article a read, you can find it here on the Thunder Bay Public Library’s Library Detective blog.

Yesterday my sixth Library Detective Article was published in the Chronicle Journal. This time around I wrote about National Hat Day. While I was looking for a topic, I consulted a list of rather crazy national holidays. Finding that January was National Hat Day, I decided to run with it. I consulted a friend in the Reference department, and he couldn’t find it listed on any official lists of holidays. But rather than scrap the idea altogether, I decided to run with it as an unofficial holiday. From knitting, nonfiction and fiction, there are quite a few books on hats to choose from, which helped make this column a lot of fun to write. If you’re interested in giving it a read, you can find it here on the Thunder Bay Public Library’s Library Detective blog.